roy

I guess this post has been a long time coming - my IRL friends [yes, I do have a few IRL friends!] have heard this gripe time and time enough.

I don't like Google. At all.

Honestly I don't know why so many people buzz around Google like it's the Best New Thing. It's not. They are simply a company that built one good product [Google Search] and ended up on the end of a viral campaign through the net that goes on today. It's really no surprise that the biggest beneficiary of a viral Net campaign is ... a Net company.

Let me start off by saying that Google's axiom of "Do no evil" is much too vague. As a recent interview with GQ says, evil is what "Sergey believes is evil." Thanks for the great clarification.

My primary gripe is that this arrogance that Google has is completely undeserved. Let's look at their "offerings:"

Google Search

Google Search. Their flagship product. I have no experience how well their "Search Appliance" works, so I'll focus on their web search. It's broken. PageRank is completely broken. Honestly, I still use Google as my default search, but more often than not I get spam links. I used to be able to "I'm feeling lucky" all the time... now I'm reluctant to do so.

Let's do a fun search of 'Tabulas' on Google. What is the second return?

That's right, "Customized Belt Buckles." Explain what this has to do with Tabulas. Do you want to know *how* that ended up so high on Google's PageRank?

I wrote one errant post that linked to that website. One post. And Google decides that this should be the second value for Tabulas. Forget the Tabulas forums or the help center. No sirree. Customized belt buckles.

If one errant post can skew results for a small-to-medium sized request ... in my mind PageRank is broken.

Other web properties

Gmail is the only website that I would say is even a moderate success. Orkut [granted, not a "official" Google project] sucks. Froogle ... does anyone use this a lot? I've tried to use it a few times and find the results less than satisfactory. I've heard that Google Groups has nothing on Yahoo! Groups. Gmaps is cool looking, but absolutely useless in terms of real functionality. Neeraj made the mistake of giving Gmaps directions to James, who promptly got lost.

So the projects are in "beta." For a big company like Google, they should do better than throwing out incompleted projects and simply calling them "beta." It seems they've misconstrued the "beta" as a excuse to not really build "completed" projects and to write off any criticisms with "oh it's in beta."

AdSense is shady as hell. I use AdSense with Tabulas, and the results are so skewed on a day-by-day basis that I'm not sure Google is really being honest with my results. Their "daily page views" never coincide with what I see on my server logs... and how do I know that Google isn't just pocketing extra cash from my AdSense account? Where's the transparency? Oh right, I get none. It's Google. They know better than me.

Gmaps and Gmail use great new interface [XMLhttpRequest], but this is hardly worth any real consideration. Unlike Amazon's API, Google's APIs are quite limited. Gmaps was preceded by map.search.ch, who did the real "groundbreaking" work a long time ago. But for most web viewers, Google is the first site that is really pushing these technologies ... so the credit and adoration goes there.

I wonder if Google cares about the semantic web

Google has no interest in seeing the growth of the semantic web. The semantic web is simply an effort by publishers to make content on the web more readily machine-readable so context and content can be drawn out by computers and metadata can be extracted. It's also supporting open APIs ("open platform") so that all web services can eventually be interoperable. Take a great look at technorati and flickr for sites truly contributing to the growth of the semantic web.

When Google relaunched "Blogger," they only offered Atom feeds for syndication. Instead of offering backwards support to the de-facto standard (RSS) ... Google decided what would be good for the web. I can understand throwing your support behind an emerging spec [Atom seems very promising], but is it really necessary to "break" support for a standard that is working alright? It's not like Google or Blogger were financially limited or didn't have the resources to quickly add RSS support.

Besides being visually compelling tools that almost anybody could build, Google doesn't offer much to the community at all. To me, it seems that Google is just developing a bunch of random projects and hoping another one hits gold ... but their flagship product seems to be suffering from a lack of attention.

As a single web developer, Google does some cool stuff, but nothing that a small web-development team couldn't do. It's not amazing. It's not ground-breaking. Everytime they have a new service, though, I am consistently surprised in how limited it is. Don't they have a lot of money? can't they develop something really groundbreaking?

I must confess the immediate reason I wrote this post is because I read this great post about a great calendaring feature. But why do people immediately assume it has to be Google? I bet if you got a bunch of smart hackers and gave them enough money for half a year, they could really do a better job than Google would. Plus I bet it would have open APIs and wouldn't break existing standards.

Their blog is an absolute joke; it's just another PR/marketing attempt to "connect" to the web.

For a company that's supposedly so avant-garde ... they really don't 'get it."

Their recent mishap in handling the whole "autolink" fiasco is another example. Google has created an option in their toolbar that lets the user click a button... the toolbar then audomatically converts words into links. For example, addresses would link to Gmaps ... ISBN numbers would link to Amazon books. Etc.

The problem here is that publishers have absolutely *no* way of opting out of the service ... Google is basically saying, "We can change the content of anything on any website and there's nothing you can do."

That is absolutely plainly wrong. I've joked about content modification before, but I would never seriously implement it. The way you write text ... the way you capitalize, the way you link, the way you have small typos is your editorial content. If I choose not to link to a ISBN number, Google has no right to profit off of that.

But Google's response? Well, given no real blog to respond to criticisms, it's been generally "we know better than you." Thanks.

At least with Microsoft, they've got someone like Scoble to open up the door to the MS world to see what they've been up to. And reading some blogs from MS, I get the distinct impression that the developers there are really listening to the community and trying to improve their products.

I'm just surprised that MS hasn't been more competent in developing their web properties while Google constantly missteps. Why doesn't MS hire some real web developers and fix up Hotmail so it doesn't suck so much? Or MSN search? I mean, MS doesn't fail horribly on the technological aspect ... but their webproperties have atrocious webpages and are too influenced by marketing people instead of gearing the whole thing towards the user experience. Where's the simplicity, man?

So now you know.